Our monthly business meeting for January, 2010 will be on Wednesday, January 6, at our potential workshop at 3119 E 26th St., Minneapolis.

At this meeting we'll make a determination on whether or not TC Maker will go forward with attempting a yearly lease of this space, based on member dues payments. We will also hold an electronics salvage and swap event, so please bring any electronics you would like to share with the group or salvage parts from.

I'd recommend posting all events to a calendar somewhere... as the information on goings on is not consistent, nor is there a consistent place to view the announced events. It needs to be in once place, and ideally allow for folks to subscribe to a calendar. CCCKC has a google calendar sidebar that list all of the dates for events right on the front page (http://blog.cowtowncomputercongress.org/). This allows anyone to easily see what is going on in the space.

I would also highly recommend adding a vision statement to the main tcmaker.org site, and regular official meeting dates, etc, rather then having them somewhere scattered in the forums.

Also I would recommend having scheduled content, pick someone to present on some topic, or run a small workshop each month, announce to the world that this is happening, these are very important keys to drawing a larger crowd. Maybe get William Gurstelle (Minnesota native) in to speak or give a demo, or invite other famous makers to the shop (Mitch Altman, etc) to run a demo or something to get people engaged, and most importantly interested in the maker scene.

Sorry to rant, but I do want to see this succeed and these are some lessons that I've learned help to draw a larger crowd (I've been running DC612 http://dc612.org) for almost 3+ years now. Anytime we have content that is somewhat structured, more people come to play.